Science Musings Blog

Monday, December 27, 2010

Peace on Earth, good will to friends

I'm not a Facebook user, and don't respond when people try to friend me. Not that I have anything against it. I just treasure my little nook of semi-privacy. Yeah, "semi-privacy" he says, when here I am blogging to the world.

You may have seen the map above (click to enlarge) generated by Paul Butler, an intern on Facebook's data infrastructure engineering team, called "visualizing friendships." You can read about how he prepared the map here. The important thing to notice is that this is not friendships plotted on a map. This is a "map" revealed by plotting friendships.

Five-hundred million users. Lord knows how many "friendships." This can't be a bad thing.